


Text Me When You Get Home

by incurableromancer



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman Friendship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Nile Freeman Needs a Hug, Romance, Slow Burn, Texting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:01:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29435007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incurableromancer/pseuds/incurableromancer
Summary: Immortality is a difficult pill to swallow. In the whirlwind of adjusting to life with Andy, Joe and Nicky, Nile grounds herself by secretly texting Booker, who even from exile understands how she's struggling more than the others can. Along the way there will be healing, comfort and love to be found for them both.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman
Comments: 5
Kudos: 51





	Text Me When You Get Home

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for explicit talk about the whole spectrum of mental health issues, post traumatic stress related to both Nile's time in the marines and to the whole team's experiences with immortality and grief, and talk about Booker's depression and suicidal tendencies.

It starts the night they leave Booker behind, after the sun goes down and adrenaline finally starts to melt away into the shadows. It goes unspoken that France will be left for him to haunt and drink his fill from. There’s some half hearted talk about where they’ll go next, some joking that feels surreal to Nile about how weird it is that they have to give Andy some time to recover from her bullet wound, some _“Nurse Nicky”_ jokes that are fired off and moved on from too fast for her to ask about.

She’s still feeling overwhelmed with everything. Copley’s revelations about the results of the team’s work had been a high, sure. Being able to walk away with Andy still in one piece, too. But there’s a good amount of numbness that she knows is eventually going to give way to grief for her family and her old life. And she’s still feeling a lot of bitterness, anger and hurt at the lack of choice in it all, the lack of explanation as to _why her, why this_ beyond the hopeful tangle of Copley’s board and the idea that doing some good for humanity might justify this strange immortal existence, this cruel separation from everything she has known and loved. Her mom. Her brother. Her friends. Her home. Her sanity. Her humanity, too, maybe. In a way that still feels vague and unsure.

Maybe that’s why she sends the first message to Booker. The knowledge that he gets it, that she saw him becoming a great friend in the brief days they had to get to know each other. Or maybe it’s just the empathy, the knowledge that she is in a position to be there for somebody whose life has been destroyed by his own attempt to gain some peace.

He’d done something terrible, yes. He’d hit a low and self-destructed so bad that he put himself and everyone he loved- and _Nile_ -in danger. And that’s clearly how the other three saw his choice, primarily. The betrayal. The recklessness. The wrong that needed to be addressed and accounted for. An act of treason by a fellow soldier in the midst of battle. A price that needed to be paid for the crime committed, a family member who lost their trust, and can’t immediately have it back, no matter how much it hurts them all to send him away.

Except, crucially, in Nile’s mind, Booker’s plight hadn’t been about the war they wage against wrong or evil, as Nicky might put it. He had ended up there, yes, when everything went wrong, when he accidentally aligned himself against the team, against his family. But the whole thing had been building slowly, since his family began to die off, at least. Lurking in the quiet moments with Andy, or, worse, Joe and Nicky. Worse still, in the moments alone. And, Nile thinks, worst of all, based on the dreams she has endured herself so far, the endless nights alone with nightmares of Quynh. He never tried to hurt them. He tried to hurt himself, and he fucked it up.

But Nile is new, and so while discussing what to do with him, she held her tongue when her suggestion of letting Booker off with an apology was brushed off, and stopped herself from biting out that the thought that she could someday find herself cut off from the only four people on the planet who understand her made her throat feel hot and tight, that she almost couldn't bear the idea of doing that to someone else, no matter what he did wrong. Even though she could easily identify the remorse in Booker, that what happened had been nowhere near what he wanted, that the crash and scrape of hitting rock bottom had obviously put some things into perspective for him, that the last thing he needed was more time alone, let alone a century. She wanted to bang her fist on the table and to ask them all, _don’t you realize you have just sentenced him to another lifetime of grief and pain? The very grief and pain that got us all here? Don’t you see the hypocrisy in punishing him for crying out for help?_

She tried again to suggest that he should get to come see Copley’s board with them, because he still deserved the knowledge and respite in knowing that their work has not been pointless, and that even he, no matter the low state he was in, had contributed to doing some good. Even if he already had seen it while working with Copley, even then. He deserved to know he was still one of them, that the victory of the knowledge was one they shared, one that will still hold true when the century is finally past.

Again, she was brushed off. It was frustrating. She felt like the only person trying to see it from Booker's point of view, and she had only known him for a few days.

Andy looked like maybe she actually agreed with Nile, maybe she might argue on her side, but then Joe’s anger cracked for the first time since the lab. He quietly said that he wouldn’t be able to walk away, to leave Booker behind if they didn’t do it immediately. And then Nicky touched his hand and said something to him in a language Nile didn’t speak (she could already tell that similar instances were going to piss her off long into the future, that she was going to have to explain time and time again that no, public school in Chicago really hadn’t set her up too well to pick up multiple new languages at once at the conversational level, and yes, she knows English is a terrible bastardized tongue but telling her that repeatedly isn’t going to grant her the ability to learn other ones any faster). Andy had responded in kind, just as incomprehensible and isolating, and the conversation was over long before Nile caught on to what she was missing out on.

Which is a damn shame, because Nile has already had enough experience with trauma, depression, and the wealth of modern research into treating it properly from losing her dad so young and then joining up with the marines herself. Enough to know that they were making a mistake, sending a man who has never been lonelier off into a century of isolation far away from anybody who remotely understands him, sending away the only one of them who really understand Nile’s struggles adjusting to all of this, who really remembers what it was like, who hasn’t been granted a soul mate or whatever it is that Joe and Nicky are, that Andy and Quynh are. Which feels unfair in itself in a way, because of course Andy gets it, to an extent, the loneliness, the grief. But there’s also six thousand years of difference between them. There’s also Andy shooting Nile in the head the day they met, and there’s Booker trying to reassure her that it’s not always like this, and keeping track of clothes for her, and using their goodbye to tell her that she’s going to be great for the team.

It’s already something she’s stewing on how to bring up to these millennia old, immortal warriors- killers, a lot of the time, no matter which way you slice it. Even though it’s for the right reasons, Nicky’s voice rings out in her head, that it’s still years and years and years of killing and being killed, of living to suffer and hopefully prevent suffering in the innocent by inflicting it on the guilty.

She wants to ask about how they cope, if there are panic attacks, or meltdowns, or shutdowns, or any other sorts of episodes. Depression, probably. Post traumatic stress. Things they had buried deep that there are tools to help them cope with, in this day in age, if they’ll trust Nile to show them. And that makes something cold and painful twist in her gut, because she knows Booker had showed every sign of being at a breaking point- hell, Andy had too. And maybe it’s not their fault that they didn’t know how to deal with this big, impossible thing- coping with being alive forever, of the loneliness, and the pain, but they still made mistakes that they didn’t have to, and are continuing to make them, with Booker.

 _He just tried to kill himself,_ she wants to scream. _He felt so alone and so embroiled in his grief and pain and the drinking that he tried to kill himself, and he was wiling to put all of you who he clearly loves in danger to do it. You all had hundreds of years with him, and you let him reach that point? And now that you know about it, you’re going to let him stay there? I know you can’t die, but my loved ones have, my fellow soldiers have. I am 27 years old and I have already seen my peers, my co-workers, my predecessors put in their graves after drinking themselves to death or by succeeding where he failed. You are going to tell me that this sorry outfit of five is all I have, and you’re going to make me watch you abandon one of us? One of our own? The one who best understands what I'm going through? The only one I can talk to about these nightmares of Quynh without feeling like shit? I won't pretend to understand how you can do that to him, and I sure as hell don't understand how you can do this to me._

She doesn’t scream, though. She knows how to hold her anger inside until she is sure that the parts exaggerated by the heat of the moment have settled down, that it’s rational.

Something she learned in therapy.

Instead, she calmly and politely rejects Nicky’s assumption that he will be preparing the fourth plate of dinner that was once for Booker for her instead, now that they’re settled in another safe house that Copley has pulled out of thin air. She doesn’t react either way to the confused look Joe gives her, or the glance he exchanges with Nicky, but she does offer Andy a pat on the shoulder, and tells her that she won’t be too late, and yes, fond smile, she will be coming back again, hopefully not to find anyone tied up or bleeding out, this time.

Joking about it already feels both cathartic and raw to Nile, and she can already tell that her and Andy are going to be pretty closely synched, as far as their humour.

It doesn’t make the well of guilt in her chest at the way Joe flinches at her words any less prominent. It makes her hesitate, wondering if she should give him and Nicky an inch, ask if they need anything in town, maybe. But she knows most places are already closed by this hour. She leaves the struggle of learning to love them as family for another day.

She thinks about asking Andy then and there if she wants Nile to pass along any messages for Booker, but then thinks better of it. She feels confident that Andy will come around the quickest to her opening this line of communication, but she doesn’t want to push their luck, which she’s learning seems to be exceptionally poor. Not just yet.

So she puts on her jacket, she grabs her phone, and she goes out.

The safe house is a thirty minute walk from town, and the fresh air does her good. It gives her time and space to think, to breathe, and to process.

The waterfront is her destination, one she’d examined through the car window on the drive in. A wharf that hosts dozens of men and kids running around with fishing rods each day while the sun is still out, wood faded and chipped, concrete painted in flaky yellow. A nice place to sit down under the stars, to breathe in the ocean air.

She pulls out her phone as soon as she’s settled, feet swinging off the edge, a couple feet up from where the water breaks. She plugs in the number Booker had given her on that night in Paris, and she types out the message she’s been revising in her head all evening.

_Nile: Hey, Booker. It’s Nile. You still using this number?_

He responds so quickly she wonders if he has his phone in his hand, and tries not to dwell on if that thought makes her sad or not.

_Booker: Yes. What’s wrong?_

Nile takes a breath.

_Nile: Nothing is wrong. Just wanted to make sure you have my number._

He takes much, much longer to respond this time.

_Booker: do the others know you’re doing this?_

_Nile: No. You implying I need permission to speak to you?_

_Booker: Of course not. I’m saying they’ve made it clear that I need permission._

_Nile: Permission to speak to them, sure. That’s the price they set. I didn’t agree with it. You telling me you’re going to say no to somebody to talk to?_

The lack of reply after twenty minutes is response enough, and she tucks her phone back in her pocket, wary of the dwindling battery life. She hates that the idea of having to ask Joe or Nicky for a charger feels exhausting, that all of Booker’s misguided and festered feelings about what they have and what he lost (what Nile will never have, she thinks, still numb) almost feel vindicating. On one hand, in a twisted way, she almost feels as though she’s on Booker’s side. But Joe and Nicky are supposed to be family too, and she _knows_ it’s not their fault. None of it is. Booker got the worst end of the immortality deal, and that they are lucky enough to have each other isn’t an intentional cruelty. What they have is beautiful. It should be a source of hope, proof that there might just be some gentle goodness in this life, that it isn’t all life or death that none of them can truly reach beyond trying to help the rest of humanity along, neither to truly live nor to truly die.

But, shit. Times like this it feels good to have somebody to be angry with, and right now, it’s easiest to look to them. The lovebirds, oblivious to the weight of an eternity alone. Even though she knows that’s not true, that they’ve lost people, their families, Quynh, and now Booker. It just stings so much that they aren’t alone in the grief, that they haven’t been alone in immortality once, not the way Nile, Andy and Booker have been, will continue to be.

She gets caught up in trying to make out the details of her reflection in the dark water for awhile. Thinks about how she could come back here in five years, or ten, or a thousand, and her face will look just the same. But the wharf might not be here. The whole town could be gone by then, for all she knows. Andy will be. And with the state of politics back home, she thinks wryly, America probably will be razed to the ground by then, if there isn’t a nuclear war to take out the whole planet, global warming, whatever else have you. It’ll just be her and the boys, and maybe Quynh, stumbling over a dead, desolate, haunted planet. What a fucking life.

She stays there for another hour before wandering up the cobbled streets, following the greasy smell of french fries to a place she can get something quick and portable to eat. Then she walks around for another two hours or so, she thinks, mind catching, sticking and gliding over thoughts and feelings from the past few days, how she plans to carry them into the future, or if she will at all, before heading back to the safe house.

She wonders what she’ll do if Booker doesn’t respond again, not for the whole century.

She wonders what she’ll do if he does.

She knows there’s supposed to be a football game on tonight, one Joe and Booker had been talking about not three nights ago, but the television is off when she gets in. Joe and Nicky are sitting at the table, drinking coffee and talking quick and solemn in that strange dialect that she can’t identify. They stop talking when she comes in, even though they appeared to be mid-conversation, putting on big, welcoming smiles and asking her about the weather and how she’s feeling, if she got something to eat, if she wants leftovers heated up. It leaves a bad taste in her mouth, even though she knows they’re just trying to connect with her. Probably worried about why she felt the need to go out. But she hates the kindness, in that moment. Thinks of all the years her mom was too tired from work to keep good company or eat dinner together, all the years the gaping absence of her dad left her to wonder what it would be like to have him for a role model, to discuss active duty now that Nile’s been in it, too. How she’ll never get to see them again, her mom and her brother, her loved ones who these people will never replace. Not without making it all more painful.

Joe and Nicky are just trying to give her normalcy. She can see that. They’re trying to show how they care about their own in the way they know how, which seems to involve a lot of food.

If Booker were here, she thinks, they could drink Irish coffee and wallow a little bit. A lot. And it wouldn’t feel like pity from him, just as it hadn’t that night in the cave. And maybe that’s not what Booker needs now, and not a habit she should get into herself. But a week ago she was a fucking mortal marine, and now she’s- not that. At all. She’s entitled to drink away her woes, a bit.

And then there’s Andy, sitting alone on the sofa, busy shuffling through a copy of Copley’s entire file on her own history. Andy, who smiles at her in a way that doesn’t make mildly irrational, oppositional defiance claw up her throat. So Nile smiles back and joins her instead of walking into the kitchen where Joe and Nicky slowly settle back into their conversation even though Nicky is way overeager to make her a cup of tea. He’s halfway to the kettle before he takes her “no, thanks, Nicky, really” for what it is, and the way Joe’s hand comes down on his shoulder when he dejectedly sits back down makes her want to kick something.

She listens instead to Andy recounting some of the more positive memories covered in the file, hams up her startled expressions at the more well-known historical escapades just for the way it makes Andy laugh. Not that her awe or trouble processing that this is her life now is in any way exaggerated. She’s still waiting for a camera crew to appear, or for the drug-daze to wear off, to find out that this has all been some elaborate prank. To go home to her family.

But there’s no camera crew, and none of it is a joke. She holds Andy’s hand when they come across the holes in the timeline that Copley hadn’t quite managed to fill in with Quynh, not having any coverage of her from the age of surveillance technology to complete her profile.

She feels a little bit shitty when Joe, Nicky, and Andy exchange honest to god goodnight hugs and kisses and she only stands off to the side, arms crossed, and gives the men nods and tired smiles, even though she does hug Andy, who follows them to the room with the cots all pushed together. She’s wiped from the bullet wound, from the loss of Booker, the previous days’ events. All of it, Nile thinks. All six thousand years, and the knowledge that it’s going to end in the blink of an eye, compared to all the time she’s waded through to get here. It sends chills down her spine.

The file is left on the coffee table, and Nile knows she’ll find Andy tearing through it all over again in the morning.

She says she’ll be in to sleep later, another stab of pettiness washing over her at the way Joe’s hand curls around Nicky’s hip as they walk away, stomach twisting at the thought of dreaming about Quynh again. Her hope had been that the close sleeping quarters had been a temporary measure while they were in active danger. Hell, maybe it is, and it’s only continuing right now because of the sheer insanity of the past few days. Maybe it’s a comfort thing for the three of them as much as it is a protection thing. She doesn’t even hate the idea of sleeping close to Nicky’s quick trigger finger, or Andy’s instincts, in all honesty. It’s probably the best way to make sure Andy doesn’t forget she’s mortal now and find a sword to get run through with in the middle of the night. Still, she hasn’t learned yet how to wake quietly from a nightmare, and she has no intention of putting Andy through the pain of watching her gasp her way back to consciousness, clutching at her throat, of having to look her in the eye and deal with her, Joe, and Nicky’s grief again while Quynh’s not-quite-ghost hovers over all their shoulders.

It’s going to be a long immortality if she never gets to sleep peacefully. Sitting alone on the sofa, drinking that Irish coffee, she wonders how the hell Booker lasted so long before he lost it.

He doesn’t respond to her text that night.

And that’s fine.

She knows that there is nothing but time, going forward.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr is @ dearpatroclus


End file.
